in Swapo death camp
Melissa Jones and Michael Gillard
Recurring nightmares of torture have haunted Emma Kambangula for the past nine years. “In one, I am naked and being beaten with bundles of sticks by three men, while two others are restraining my daughter, Freda, who is crying, screaming and trying to run to me,” explains the 38-year-old Namibian human rights activist.
Both mother and daughter are presently in London, receiving counselling for torture victims.
Kambangula’s nightmares began soon after her release, in May 1989, from a secret concentration camp in Angola. While it marked the end of four years’ imprisonment in a 3,5m-deep dungeon covered with corrugated iron and grass, it was also the start of a lonely struggle to confront injustice and betrayal.
Like hundreds of women and men held in these underground death camps – some for as long as 10 years – Kambangula was repeatedly tortured until she falsely confessed on video to being an apartheid spy.
The torturers were her own comrades in arms, young black soldiers from Swapo (the South African People’s Organisation) who fought for 30 years against South Africa’s brutal control of its neighbour, Namibia, until independence in 1990.
Kambangula was just 18 and still in her school uniform the day she ran away to join Swapo’s rebel army on the Angolan border in 1979. Full of pride and respect for the liberation movement, she never dreamed her decision would end in anything but dignity for her oppressed people.
After training at communist party schools in Moscow, Lusaka and Budapest, her promising rise through the youth ranks ended in 1985 when she was suddenly recalled by Swapo to Angola.
“The atmosphere was very different,” she remembers. “There were rumours that women had been sent [by South African intelligence] with razor blades in their vaginas to kill Swapo leaders.”
Within months, she was arrested and sent to Minya women’s camp in Lubango. Kambangula’s former comrades showed no mercy. For two months, they beat her naked body red, black and blue, demanding that she confess. She was blindfolded, hung upside down and beaten until she fell to the floor. This brutality left her paralysed in the camp hospital for seven months.
Swapo used torture and terror to get prisoners to implicate each other as apartheid agents. When told her aunt would be arrested, Kambangula finally gave in. It is widely believed Swapo leaders now in government used the spy scare to cover up an internal purge of reformist elements who were criticising their military decisions, speaking out against corruption and arguing for more internal democracy.
Kambangula and 200 other “detainees” returned to Namibia in July 1989 as part of a United Nations sponsored peace plan. No one came to meet her. “When I saw the women being met by their relatives, I wished I had died in the dungeons. I stayed on the bus and cried. I realised the two people I loved, my mother and sister, were dead.”
Like many other “spies”, Kambangula was ostracised by her remaining pro- Swapo family and other newly liberated black Namibians who, with the international community, put Swapo on a pedestal. Around 3 000 detainees are missing and Swapo still has not satisfactorily accounted for them.
In 1996, she channelled her rage into fulfilling a promise to those left behind in the camps. “We promised each other that those we left behind and those who died there would not be forgotten. I promised to tell the world about Swapo and our detention,” Kambangula recalls.
That year, she set up the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation – the first of its kind in Namibia. It treats victims of atrocities committed by both sides in the liberation struggle, including her torturers, who she sees frequently on the streets or in government offices.
“If I am getting nightmares, so must they. That’s why I suggested they, too, should receive counselling, so they can tell the truth. The detainee question is a timebomb and it will have to explode sometime.”
May
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